It’s that time again, folks. The first set of projections are here.

Here’s how this works. Each weekend from now until the end of the season, I project out every potential bowl eligible team. In the past, I had pretty much eyeballed this, but these days I now use SP+ to project each team’s final record.

I then attempt to determine the College Football Playoff controlled games based on their rules and precedents. Remember, my projections are attempting to extrapolate out from now through the last weekend of the season.

For non-CFP games, I attempt to apply each conference’s selection criteria to the bowls they are partnered with. Unfortunately, this is when the science starts to get very, very inexact. With the latest bowl deals that nominally took effect for the 2020 season, almost every conference has abandoned any sort of performance-based criteria for how their bowls are seeded. In addition, some conferences, especially in the Group-of-Five, have ceded almost all control of where their teams are placed to ESPN events, which owns about half of the bowl games.

This makes the call of which teams go where nearly impossible to predict anymore. Nonetheless, I will give it a shot and see if I can learn anything this year that I can apply to future seasons. I didn’t really do bowl predictions last year because half of the games were canceled and many teams opted-out.

An additional wrinkle for this week is that I am short five teams for all available slots. I will work in future weeks to determine what remedies may be available if this actually happens, but in the meantime any game that is lacking a team should have a “???” in at least one of its slots.

This is basically impossible this year. It was going to be hard enough with the new bowl contracts, where the conferences and ESPN are now leveraging more control than ever. But removing eligibility requirements takes it to a whole other level. Usually, I make a spreadsheet and predict which teams will wind up 6-6, and then try to judge how the various stakeholders might pick a team. Yeah, not in 2020.

So here they are, my best guesses heading in Championship Weekend. The table still needs some updates, but those likely won’t go up until after all the games have been announced. I will also be utterly shock if anything I predicted is correct, just because it’s almost all guessing due to the reasons mentioned above. But hey, I’ve been doing this since 1999, I can’t stop now.

Well, I stayed up late scouring the web for any news or hints as to how things will shake out this morning. My best guesses are here.

I’ll the hit high points:

• I think Wisconsin will fall behind Penn State and Auburn in the rankings and miss a New Year’s Six game completely.
• Consequently, I think the Citrus will pass up the Badgers to take Michigan to match them against Alabama.
• With 4 SEC teams in the New Year’s Six/Playoffs, that makes the lower-tier SEC bowls pretty nervous. I found at least one reasonably convincing article that indicated Navy would head to the Liberty Bowl, for example.
• I took that example even further, generally promoting AAC teams into missing spots and then using C-USA teams to fill in the AAC spots.

After I wake up in the morning, I’ll be trying to go through each announcement and re-arranging the dominoes for any picks I miss. As I’ve said before, the main thorn in my side while trying to predict these games is the bowls ESPN owns. ESPN can, has, and will move teams around to create more favorable matchups for TV despite whatever affiliations the bowl may actually have. The potential for weirdness is ripe.

Of course, my projections are also hosed if Wisconsin winds up in the Rose or Cotton Bowls. So we’ll see!

So I made some quick revisions based on how far the Committee dropped Alabama. Expect a full revision Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Well, it was definitely an interesting final weekend of the regular season, including an upset that definitely made these predictions harder without knowing how the Committee will act.

The good news is that there’s definitely enough teams, but just barely. 79 teams are eligible for bowl games, but only 78 will be able to play into December and/or January.

None of the Power 5 conferences will be able to fill all their bids, so I had to improvise a fair bit. I generally moved AAC teams up where I felt like I could, and then filled in the gaps that left in the lower-tier bowls.

So let’s start with the play-off. I am operating under the assumption that Ohio State, LSU, and Clemson will win their conference championship games. So that’s easy. The hard part essentially boils down to: if Utah beats Oregon to win the Pac-12, can they get in over a 2-loss Georgia or 1-loss Oklahoma? From attempting to read the tea leaves of the committee rankings so far, I think they will. I don’t necessarily agree with it, as I’d rather see Oklahoma there, but alas.

So the next crucial question is: how far does Alabama drop this week, and if Georgia loses, how far do they drop in relation to Alabama? Whoever is ranked higher will be the Sugar Bowl bid. Similarly, how much will their loss hurt Minnesota? Penn State now has to be the favorite for the Rose Bowl, shutting out both Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Let’s examine some other talking points real quick:

• With four SEC teams in the New Year’s Six collection of bowls, we’re looking at some interesting decisions the lower-tier SEC bowls will have to make. The Birmingham, Liberty, Music City, and Independence all get left out in my reckoning. I sent UCF to play Oklahoma State in the Liberty and Cincinnati to the Music City. I don’t know what these bowls will actually do, but pulling up the strong AAC teams was my best guess. The other thing I may need to do is refer back to the list of ESPN-owned bowls, as that provides many opportunities for surprise re-arrangements.
• The bowl game I’ve decided I really need to happen the Redbox Bowl. In computer science circles, Illinois and Cal are known as UIUC and Berkeley, respectively, and between them they were/are responsible for many of the most important innovations in computing. Among other things, the first successful Web browser was originally developed at UIUC; Berkeley developed BSD, which plays a major role in the history of computer operating systems that aren’t Windows (which, with the advent of smartphones, is the vast majority of OSes running the wild today).
• Otherwise, I may need to edit these predictions later this week, based on the Committee rankings. There’s a few bowl slots already confirmed, but otherwise I will try to get the last set of projections out late Saturday/early Sunday.